Great that it's a success. But since it's a pool of cheap memes I'm not about to unblock it on my computer's hosts file.
You can tune your frontpage as you please, so it's easy to have a great experience with reddit.
But if you've got it in your hosts file (why?) you must really hate it, so I'm probably wasting words. But your post as akin to saying Hacker News is just full of "I'm a startup!" posts, which it's not.
Let's say I like video games, and one of those games is Minecraft. If I subscribe to the Minecraft reddit, it seems that about 1/Nth of the posts on my front page will be about Minecraft (where N is the number of subreddits I have).
I'm pretty conservative with subreddits (added linux and apple, removed politics and atheism, that's pretty much it), so suddenly I have a lot of Minecraft.
Some sort of slider would make subreddits for specific games, programming languages, etc. much more appealing to me, so that I could say, "I really only want to see the best Python-specific stories, but I'll take all of the general programming stories".
Agreed. /r/programming used to have discussions much like HN does. But I've had to remove it from any subreddit I have as its just full of random programmish related stuff, barely.
Out of curiosity, what does everyone on HN think of ways to fix the subreddit problem? Its obvious voting doesn't provide any sort of filter, and tagging would likely only end up with the same problem.
Or are we just condemned to constantly have to flock to new sites for good technical discussions of things?
In theory moderators on Reddit should be some sort of quality control, but usually they just say "well if that is what the community wants..." and let the most ridiculous pandering submissions slide.
Someone needs to blend user submitted stories with editors and find where the sweet spot between the two is.
Until the two systems can be blended in an awesome hybrid, then yes, we will continue to flock to new sites as the old ones fall prey to eternal September.
I've tuned it, more than once, and it's still not a great experience. Maybe if I tried harder I could get it there, but it's certainly not easy. At this point the only way to make it better is to turn off sub reddits about topics I am interested in, but that misses the point doesn't it?
I also get tired of all the stupid pics that get voted up to the top.
That is one of the reasons I love HN. Silly stuff is ignored and downvoted.